


The Burden of Memory

by beetle



Category: Dracula - Bram Stoker
Genre: Gen, Hunted Vampires, Vampires
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-17
Updated: 2014-06-17
Packaged: 2018-02-05 01:28:12
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 444
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1800415
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/beetle/pseuds/beetle
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Written for the prompt(s): I remember. . . .</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Burden of Memory

**Author's Note:**

> None.

I remember. . . .

I remember the way the moonlight would shine upon your hair.

As we strolled along the Champs Elysees, waiting for some unlucky cutpurse to accost us, I would proclaim my love for you to the wide, listening night. And you would laugh, and kiss me, and call me silly. But I knew your teasing words for the  _I love you, too_ s that they were.

I remember Prague, and the beauteous wonder it became in winter. You: as pale as an icicle against the backdrop of a fairytale.

I recall that particular winter was a lean one for Europe. The cutpurses and desperation-forged brigands were thick on the ground.

We never ate so well as that year.

I remember the wedding in Bruges . . . you ate the bride and I ate the bridegroom, and we shared the little flower girl between us as dessert. Ah, but she was as sweet as candy. . . .

And then we danced a waltz in the bridal bower among their strewn corpses.

I remember how grand it all was . . . with you . . . how unutterably  _perfect_. I remember looking into your eyes and feeling a love so deep and everlasting that not even death had sundered or changed it.

Then  _he_  showed up and he. Ruined.  _Everything_.

I remember first seeing the old man in the village of Annecy several days earlier; I recall with especial vividness his wild, white hair and his even wilder eyes. I further remember his reappearance on  _this_  fateful night, waylaying us by the banks of the Rhone—the holy words on his lips burned no worse than the water he splashed us with.

In that instant, I  _knew_  who he was . . . man of myth, rumor, and legend. The Horror. The Scourge. I  _knew who he was_ , and I trembled, beloved. Not for my sake, but for yours.

I remember the carved wooden stake in his hand as it drove into your chest. I remember your scream . . . and the way your limp body fell into the cold waters of the rushing Rhone.

I remember this and scream also as, stumbling, I fall to my knees at his feet and gaze up into his wide, crazed eyes. The wooden stake, black with your blood, and sizzling, plunges into my chest. I feel no pain in the place where my heart used to beat. Nothing could compare to the pain of losing  _you_. Not even this.

Finally, with my ultimate in-drawn breath, I remember you, my beloved, to the wide, listening night. I remember you and I curse his name with the last of my life. With my final exhalation, before oblivion takes me, I hiss: “ _Van Helsing_!”


End file.
